Matchbox Superfast MB56-c BMC Pininfarina

The BMC Pininfarina was a bright orange 1968 concept car designed by the famous Italian coachbuilder and design studio Carrozzeria Pininfarina which spawned the very successful Citroen GS and CX models from 1972 and the Rover SD1 of 1976 famously preferred by many UK police forces 1976-86.
The Lesney casting is most well known in pre-production form fitted with pre-SuperFast wheels with a number of survivors most often found in silver and used in some original official publicity shots for the launch of SuperFast.
Millions were made in gold clearcoat over silver primer as part of the original launch wave of SuperFast castings. There were no significant shade variations in the gold with the lightest and darkest available being hard to tell apart when only one extreme is in hand. It can be found with solid or hollow or a mixture of 11.2x2mm thin 5 slot wheels.

The first re-colour is also the hardest colour to find today, bright or 'nursery' pink over white primer identical to that used on the first release of the no 8 Wildcat Mustang and the SuperKings Dodge Charger Dragster. As with this latter pair of castings, the colour was changed to peach-pink which varied considerably from batch to batch of paint.

Settling on 2 main shades of orange and light orange for its last 2 years in the range, of which the light orange shade was also used on the 23 VW camper. There was only 1 casting modification which occurred after the first orange run, when all 4 wheel wells were cut out to enable wide tyres to be fitted without rubbing the body sides. the rear arch lost its flat top and certainly didnt improve the appearance of the casting.
At this time the switch to 10x4mm 5 slot wide tyres was made, with hard to find orange crossovers having thin wheels and wide arches existing. One short hard to find run circa 1974 was made with silver painted baseplates,all others produced had plated baseplates.

It is possible to find most codes and colour variations fitted with very smart G3 Giftset stickers.
This model came in F, G and H boxes, all blisterpacks with copyright dates from 1969 to 1974 plus Tesco multipacks from 1980-81. The multipack issues were old stock stored at the factory for 5 or 6 years identical to the standard 1974 issue.
Note: the pink, the peach and the orange shades are all very prone to sunfade.